Markus Pfieffer has committed Larisa Grigore’s Google Summer of Code work, “SysV IPC in userspace”. It’s been a bit since the event finished, but it’s in DragonFly now.
BSDTalk 237 has 22 minutes of conversation with George Neville-Neil about The FreeBSD Journal.
For those of you near the NYC area, there’s a NYCBUG meeting tonight at 7 Eastern, with Brian Callahan giving a security-focused crash course in OpenBSD. Tickets for NYCBSDCon 2014, happening on February 8th, are going to be available there for the first time, starting at 6 PM. (and cheaper if you buy in person, too.)
Matthew Dillon acquired one of the Acer c720 Chromebooks recently. There were changes needed for the boot process, for the keyboard, an update from FreeBSD for the ath(4) wireless (g), smbus, and trackpad… but it works now, and he detailed exactly how to get it running, and even upgrade the drive.
‘M M’ had trouble with his “Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC” on DragonFly some time ago. He was able to get it working, and he documented the somewhat convoluted procedure here.
If you want to track the bleeding edge of DragonFly, which is currently version 3.7, I happened to describe it in a reply to Filippo Moretti, on users@. Long-time users will know this/do this already, but it’s worth repeating just because new users may not realize how easy it is.
The holiday break for most people at the end of the year translated to a lot more material showing up now. We all benefit!
The Year Megaplatforms Ruled The Internet. Online companies aren’t ‘disruptive’ any more; they are the establishment. That didn’t take long. Is it a cycle? I hope so. (via)
Intel XDK. Should be cross-platform enough to work on DragonFly, I bet. (via)
On Hacking MicroSD Cards. Bunnie Huang from 30C3, so it’s in-depth. “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” The microcontroller on the cards is exploitable. (via)
Speaking of 30c3, the recordings are up. (via same place)
Bignum Bakeoff contest recap, from 2001. 512B to return the largest number possible. (via)
Owlbears, Rust Monsters, and Bulettes, oh my! The origin of some of the AD&D Monster Manual monsters. (via)
The Postmodernity of Big Data. I don’t know about the text, but I like the punchcard images.
You are going to be using IPv6, whether you are ready or not. (via, with good discussion)
End Paper Maps. This is ephemera that shan’t survive the Internet, I suppose – but I always did enjoy it. (via)
Understanding the Galaga No-Fire Cheat. I would have loved to do this as a child, but surviving 15 minutes in a coin-op video was nearly impossible, barring (for me) one strange exception. (via)
Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking. (also via)
Remember, The Cloud means that even if companies last, their services may not – even if there’s no other service to replace it. (via)
Eventually, will every program have its own internal upgrading and management code? It seems like it.
New Year’s Resolutions for Sysadmins. Some of these resolutions look forward, some look backward.
Things are picking up again after the break.
- Faces of FreeBSD: Isabell Long. Note that she came in via Google Code-In. That’s the value of those programs.
- OpenBSD: Randomness, sooner.
- OpenBSD’s change to PIE for i386 means special upgrade procedures – if you’re on i386. Also, here’s PIE. atexit(3) changes also changes the upgrade method this one time for… all platforms? I’m not sure.
- The DiscoverBSD roundup for 12/31/2013.
- The FreeBSD Test Suite. It’s similar to what NetBSD has, but see the source link for comments on what’s different. DragonFly has a test setup too, though I’ve never tried it – is there one for OpenBSD?
- Pkgsrc-2013Q4 is branched.
- FreeBSD has improved NFS performance.
- NetBSD has updated libpcap, tcpdump, wpa, bind, and dhcpcd.
- OpenBSD has updated xterm, glproto, and some other xenocara parts.
The ixgbe(4) driver, for a number of Intel 10Gb network cards, has been updated by Sepherosa Ziehau to version 2.5.15. Note that this changes the interface name to ‘ix’ by default. This driver is actually written by Intel.
Franco Fitchner has updated mdocml in DragonFly to 1.12.3. The changelog is right on the front page of the vendor site.
Update: Undeadly has a nice summary of the changes.
BSDNow 18, first of the new year, is up. Among other things, it mentions my crazy ‘OpenPF’ idea, and there’s an interview with Baptiste Daroussin. He’s one of the people working on pkg, so whatever he does there affects both FreeBSD and DragonFly.